Someone should probably inform the ghost of Emmy Noether that genius is a masculine adjective.

Or Ada Lovelace or Marie Curie or Virginia Woolf.

Respectively, these women dominated and influenced their fields for generations. Noether’s mathematics inspired Albert Einstein’s work; Lovelace essentially came up with the idea of coding centuries before the first personal computer; Curie discovered radiation with tragic result; and Woolf was the literary genius at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.

But, according to one historian at Cambridge University, the word “genius” evokes masculine imagery. Instead of suggesting we reframe the images the word inspires, Dr. Lucy Delap, deputy director of history and policy at Cambridge, said schools such as Cambridge and Oxford should avoid using it altogether, along with “flair” and “brilliance” because they might make female students shrink from their full potential. (Maybe it’s a Britishism, but at least for me, the word flair does not conjure images of traditional male ascendency).

Period products are dressed up to cover a messy truth.Illustration by Sarah Lazarovic

Delap made the comments in a rather combative BBC Radio 4 interview about why female students at those two U.K. universities aren’t doing as well as male counterparts. It’s a weird outlier, given how much better girls across the Western world often fare in our education systems — so much so that there has been not a little handwringing about how boys are being left behind.

So Delap’s main point — the reason she was on air — that something’s amiss at these two schools is salient. Actually, much of her interview makes sense, despite her interviewer’s incredulity at her suggestion the once all-male institutions still make them less-than-female friendly spaces. She also said the history department is refiguring its curriculum to include more options for students to write papers on their interests and revamping the canon to tell more women’s histories as well as the stories of people of colour and other minorities.

On most modern university campuses the canon has been marching in this direction for decades. Books such as Oronooko, or The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn are discussed alongside Daniel Defoe and debated as to which qualifies as the first English novel. These are good things that bring, dare I say it, forgotten geniuses back into the classroom.

Maybe we just need better painkillers to treat severe period symptoms more effectively.Wikipedia Commons

When shifts toward a more inclusive education system start to stumble is when they seek to lower the bar to ensure equal success — as was the case when Cambridge suggested it might move to more take-home exams to help its female students succeed.

It’s a bit precious, to say the least. The greater number of female medical school graduates in Canada, for example, seem to have no trouble with good, old-fashioned tests. This is not reasonable accommodation to help students with different needs (say, a learning disability) succeed. Instead, it’s the kind of move that is like catnip to critics of identity politics. It’s also insulting to suggest young women aren’t as capable of sitting an exam as young men, just as it is to suggest they can’t aspire to be geniuses. Yes, ensuring they have smart women to look up to — whether as their profs or among their readings — remains essential, as Delap rightly pointed out, but shifting the bar lower suggests an inherent weakness in the female sex that feels more Victorian than it does postmodern.

Which brings us to Canada, where the debate about sick leave for menstruation has resurged. The CBC show The Current revived the “period days” discussion last week as Italy looks to follow several Asian nations in offering women such leave.

That was followed by a column in Metro by Vicky Mochama, who makes the very salient point that “the response to a culture that shames women is not to enshrine that shame” when it comes to asking for time off for being sick from menstruation.

But what that piece fails to acknowledge is how regressive such a sex-based move would be in 2017. It would essentially be saying, hey, here’s a reason why women aren’t as effective employees: not only do you have to be prepared to accommodate the fact they may have a baby, but maybe every month they will cost your company productivity. The column points out that lost productivity may already be happening, as foreign studies have suggested, but I don’t think time off for period cramps is the solution. It’s treating the symptom and not the cause.

Instead, we need to acknowledge the gap in the science of understanding why menstruation is so painful for some women and not for others; perhaps instead of taking time off, we could improve treatments for extreme period pain. Seeking help for that can hold its own stigma, which is why this is such an important discussion to have. There’s also the fact that creating “period days” would renew arguments women are, in fact, the weaker sex, and therefore in need of special treatment — something feminism spent much of the 20th century debunking and still permeates our politics. How often are female politicians or public figures described as too emotional or angry or mean or dismissed because they may have “blood coming out of her wherever”? “Period days” would only serve to prove there’s some salience to the ancient idea women just can’t handle some things as well as men because they are built differently. Then, as Mochama acknowledges, it’s a bit of a privileged stance to even be in a position to receive “period days.”

Who would get to take period leave if it were offered? We already know unionized and office workers are more likely and more able to take their sick days; shift workers and lower-income women — arguably those who would need the leave the most as their jobs are often more physical — would least be able to enjoy it. But singling out periods as in need of special treatment also ignores that not all women get that sick from them — and I write this as someone who has thrown up because my cramps are so bad. There are many other reasons people of any gender may need time off. Yes, most women would feel weird calling a boss and saying they are taking a sick day because their uterus is trying to escape. But what about people with irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease, who can have monthly flareups in their symptoms? Or mental health issues? It’s still not accepted in most workplaces to call in and say, “My anxiety is so bad I can’t get out of bed.”

The problem is less about zeroing in on one group — or identity — and offering it special leave, and more about ensuring our workplace laws offer enough sick leave and support so people with varying ailments can succeed. Ensuring equal access to those benefits for part-time and shift workers would be a better way to support women who need to let their bodies rest, for any reason.

What brings these three examples together is a penchant to rub the hard edges off the world for the sake of gender equity. The science of biological gender difference has deepened, as has our understanding that gender is not necessarily entirely a construct. But understanding those differences is not the same thing as seeking to coddle women, to shield them from their own potential genius or to enshrine a physiological ailment as a special form of sick leave.

It’s the very logic that spurred dangerous Victorian notions of women’s wandering uteruses; and as often as mine tries to escape, I would rather suffer the pain than give an inch to those who would frame me as a wilting flower who can’t weather the storm as well as any man.